


As If We Were Already Gone

by Kaza999



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Post LSODM, Reset Button, mention of alice's death, mention of suicide, this series is tragedy, written pre-book 9
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 00:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaza999/pseuds/Kaza999
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a machine that is capable of resetting time itself, turning it back so that mistakes can be undone and wrongs can be made right.  Darquesse does not want it used.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As If We Were Already Gone

**Author's Note:**

> So this came about because I was wondering if book 9 could theoretically end in a 'reset button' ending, but then I wanted to put some Derek-esque horror and tragedy in it, and this is what you get.

Darquesse screamed aloud when the memories first started coming. There were so _many_.

They were so varied in scope and strength, and there were many different things pouring into her head at once. Enough pain and love and grief and hope and darkness and death and sweetness and light to last her for a thousand lifetimes. 

At first, she didn't understand where they were all coming from. She thought that perhaps she had somehow tapped into a vein of alternate universes, that the different lives she might have lived were streaming through her mind entirely by accident.

That was before she found the Turnback Machine. She saw it appear again and again in the alien memories in her head, and so she had gone to look for it just in case it existed in her world. It did. 

The Turnback Machine was a thing hidden deep in the Antarctic, an old thing that gave off impressive amounts of magic. It had the look and feel of the Ancients about it, being strangely old but more advanced than anything else she had ever seen. It had never been used, and she wondered why until she touched it and understanding surged into her mind. 

She was wrong. It had not been used before _in this loop._

The whole world had been going through the same loop of time, a span of several years, over and over again. 

The beginning of the loop was always Gordon Edgely's death. The end was always when someone decided to use the machine. 

The machine had somehow communicated this information to her, making her remember it and all the previous lives she had lived, calling her to find it. Darquesse wasn't sure how. She suspected that the thing held a moderate level of sentience, but not enough to stop it from being used by would-be saviors time after time. 

Even with this communication, Darquesse still did not fully understand the machine and the events that inevitably led to its usage. She suspected that the memories that the machine had forced into her mind were the key. The memories were all strange and unique, and required a great deal of examination. Once she had the patience and the strength, Darquesse looked through them all at length. What she saw fascinated and disturbed her. 

In one life she was Kenspeckle Grouse's apprentice. In this one she was teaching Carol and Crystal magic and fighting alongside them. Here she wielded a sword like Tanith, here she bore symbols like China. Once, she was even a mother to a child of most illegitimate birth. Darquesse laughed when she found out who the father was, then felt a strange prickling behind her eyes when the child, magically aged beyond her years, activated the Turnback Machine with tears streaming down her face.

In all the lifetimes, however, there were some things that were always the same. Valkyrie always became Darquesse. She always discovered her name and locked it away inside her chest and forsake her old identity to become something new.

And always, always, _always_ someone came to the Turnback Machine and reversed time to save her.

Every single time. 

She would have laughed at the futility of the gesture had she herself not been a victim of the loop herself. 

Every friend who had reset the world had said something to her before turning the machine on, and she recalled every one of their statements like they had been seared into her brain.

_“Please change your mind, for me.”_

_“We need you!”_

_“I have to do this.”_

_“I hope this works.”_

_“It will be okay, Stephanie.”_

_“We don't have any other choice.”_

_“'Bye, Val.”_

_“I'll save you, I promise!”_

_“I'll find you, Val, I promise.”_

_“I'll come back, I promise!”_

_“I need you.”_

_“I love you.”_

_“Goodbye, Momma.”_

_“I'm so sorry, Valkyrie.”_

There were promises and tears and hysterical laughter and declarations of love from unlikely sources—everything you could think of to put in parting words, there was. But only one person had ever bothered to say sorry for doing this. Sorry for ruining the whole world because they loved her too much. 

It wasn't Skulduggery who had apologized. Somewhere deep in her chest, she felt a pang of something like pain when she realized that. 

No, it was just Ghastly. A living Ghastly who loved her like a little sister. She remembered fighting beside him and solving problems with him and falling asleep on his shoulder and him cradling her gently against his chest when she was hurt. That version of her had been a rather sweet seamstress-in-training before she had become Darquesse. It was funny, in a depressing sort of way. 

When she ran out of memories to look through, she came to only one conclusion. She decided that she had to kill the world. She had to stop the cycle. The weight of the memories pressed down on her soul, and she could feel the exhaustion seeping into her heart. Living so many lifetimes was tiring. She wanted to rest so very badly. She hadn't ever wanted to before, hadn't ever felt this tired. And sad. She felt sad but didn't really know why. 

She supposed that this was a tragedy. Yes, that was it. Everything was a tragedy. 

Looking into her memories, she could see that killing everyone in the world was something that previous iterations of her had tried before, but it had the best chance of working. Other things had failed either more quickly or more spectacularly, and she wanted to at least make a _good_ effort to end things.

Luckily, this version of herself had one trick up her sleeve that she had never, ever tried before.

She might be able to get Lord Vile on her side. 

So she left the Turnback Machine for the moment. She killed and killed and killed, trying to get rid of as many people as she possibly could, until she could no longer tell exactly who she was killing but it didn't matter. Where some would fall, others would rise. She had destroyed entire cities, freeing people from their lives but still they came, trying to stop her because no one understood.

There was no point trying to explain. She'd done that before, and it hadn't worked, so it stood to reason that it wouldn't work now. No, it was better if she simply attacked, striking without warning so they couldn't get ready for her. 

She killed her family. Her mother and father and little Alice. She felt no remorse for it. They were free from the cycle, they were hopefully at rest, and if this worked, she would be free to join them soon. 

She tried to talk Skulduggery into being Lord Vile every time she saw him, but he was very stubborn. She thought that he was starting to crack, though, after she had killed the Edgely family. 

Finally, after weeks of death, Darquesse needed a break. And she needed to make sure that whoever would reach the Turnback Machine reached it too late. 

She went to the building in the Antarctic which housed the Turnback machine, to find it already broken into. She cursed under her breath, and sped inside, wanting desperately to find the user and stop them.

It was Skulduggery who was approaching the Turnback Machine. Of course it was. By himself, too. Lucky for her and very typical of him. She silently floated into the room, stilling the air around her so she could sneak up on him. It was funnier that way. 

“I hope you're not planning on switching that on,” Darquesse said from behind him.

Skulduggery went very still, then slowly turned around to face her. “Why not?” he asked casually. 

“Do you know what it does?”

“It undoes time. Turns it back. It _is_ called a Turnback Machine, after all.”

“That's right. And do you know how many times someone has used it?”

Skulduggery tilted his head to the side. “...never?”

Darquesse laughed. “No. Thousands and thousands of times. Millions.”

“Ah.” Skulduggery looked at her steadily. He didn't seem surprised, but recently he'd developed the habit of being very still when he spoke to her, so she had a harder time telling his emotions. She could tell them anyway, but it was nice that he tried. “How do you know that?”

She tapped the side of her head. “I remembered it. That's how I found the thing. You found it a different way, but I remembered.”

“And what is it that you remember?”

“We always end up here.” she spread out her arms to encompass the chamber. “Me and my best friend. Or my boyfriend, or my girlfriend, or my cousin or my sister or my child or parent.”

He tilted his head questioningly at her. “Your sister is too young to have any effect on this, and you have no child.” He didn't mention what happened to Alice this time around. Darquesse didn't feel very strongly one way or the other about that. He had tried using Alice's death against her before, and apart from a funny feeling in the back of her throat and a flicker of rage in her belly, she hadn't felt a thing. Alice was free now. 

So instead of doing anything else, Darquesse laughed again. “It's complicated. Either way, we always come here, and someone always pushes the button.”

“You always turn into Darquesse.” the fingers of his left hand curled in on themselves while the rest of him stayed still. She noticed that his gloves were worn and filthy, with holes where his phalanges showed through. 

She nodded, tearing her eyes away from his gloves. “Yes. You can't stop it. I was a civilian once, a mortal, a girl in school with ordinary friends and an ordinary life. And I still did it. The magic still comes out.”

“So you want to kill everyone so they can't use the machine, is that it?”

“Yes!” she grinned, pleased that he was so astute. She remembered having a similar conversation with Carol, and with Crystal, and Fletcher, and even Scapegrace once. It had not gone nearly so quickly 

“Why not kill yourself?” he asked. “Throw yourself into a lava pit or into low orbit or just stop healing yourself. Then you wouldn't have to worry about us using the machine, because you would be gone.”

She was surprised at how casually he spoke of her suicide. “It doesn't work that way. I can't take the risk,” she explained. “I can't take the risk that someone would use the machine after I was dead, when I couldn't stop them. I tried to kill myself once. My mother used it, and I came back to life. We all did.”

Skulduggery stilled in surprise, his hands freezing. “How did she even _find_ it?”

Darquesse shrugged. “Things were very strange that time around.”

“So instead of taking another chance to make things right, you decide to kill everyone.” she could hear the disapproval in his voice. She could almost see what he must be thinking. If he had the chance to make things right in his own life, to take back Lord Vile and everything he had done, he would do it in a heartbeat. 

“I'm so tired, Skulduggery,” she told him, sinking to the ground and crossing her legs. “I feel old and I feel tired. I'm not having fun anymore. I can see everything I've ever done and it never made a difference. It all turned back.”

“We all feel tired.” he said, shoulders tight in that way of his that meant he had absolutely no sympathy for her grievances.

She shook her head. “Not like this, Skulduggery. Never like this.” 

“So you will kill everyone, just because of what you _think_ will happen?”

“It won't matter how many people I kill if you turn the machine on!” she snapped, getting to her feet and making the shadows around them buck and writhe. Skulduggery took a cautionary step back. She took a breath and continued. “I told you. Everyone will just come back to life again. We have all been denied rest by that machine, every single person in the world has died at least one death but no one can move on because they are all dragged back to the beginning of the story, because you wanted to save me.”

“This is about trying to save the whole world,” Skulduggery lied. “Not just you.” she could see the lie in his head and in his hands. He hadn't realized she knew his tells, but she did.

“It's all been about me,” Darquesse said, pushing an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “You all made it about me. You and the whole world. None of you could let me go.”

Skulduggery didn't say a word.

“I'm narcissistic and self-centered and selfish, but you've always made the decision about me.” she smiled, a little sadly. “You wanted to save me. Every single time. No enemy--no _old_ enemy--of mine has ever gotten a hold of the machine.”

“Funny, the way that works.” Skulduggery said slowly.

“Yeah. A little bit.”

They were both quiet for a few moments. Darquesse recalled the times when Skulduggery and Valkyrie had been at Skulduggery's house, and it was late at night, and the pair of them lapsed into a comfortable silence. This was nothing like that. 

“You could just kill me,” Skulduggery said. “If I turn the machine on.”

“I've tried it before. Not you, in particular, but I've done it with other people. Someone is always faster than I am.” she waved a hand as if shooing his suggestion aside. 

“What about destroying the machine itself?” he offered. She could hear a touch of desperation about his voice now. Good, that meant he was listening to her. 

“Tried that too. The only thing I haven't tried is having Lord Vile by my side when I kill the world.” she looked at him with her dark eyes, and the shadows surged all around them. 

Skulduggery made no move towards the machine, but neither did he move away from it.

“We're trapped, Skulduggery. The only way to be free is to die.”

He shook his head slowly. “There must be some other way.”

She smiled, a little sadly. She could see the tragedy sink onto his shoulders, the understanding begin to burden him. “This world ended a long time ago, Skulduggery. We lost. We're just ghosts now, wandering around and doing the same things over and over again. Help me end this, and we can all go free.”

His shoulders slumped, and he let out a sound that could have been a sigh, if he had lungs. 

“So. What are you going to do?” Darquesse asked. “Will you put on the armor and help me end this?”

Skulduggery stood very still. Then he said “We all deserve just one last chance, Valkyrie. Please. Just one more time to get it right.” and whirled and cranked the machine's main switch on. 

Darquesse opened her mouth to shout, but before she could, the whole world was enveloped in light.

Stephanie blinked her eyes against the bright sunlight. She stared around at the graveyard as the funeral ceremony for Gordon went on around her. 

A little ways away from the funeral, she could see a tall, thin man standing under a tree. She could see no part of his face.

As if he could feel her eyes on him, he turned and walked down the hill and out of sight. 

She wondered who he was.

**Author's Note:**

> There's an alternate ending where Darquesse convinces Lord Vile to help her end the world, but I didn't like that one as much. Just know that the 'good' ending is the end of the world.


End file.
